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Cars Are Getting Hacked, What’s New?

For those who didn’t know, cars are already fully capable of driving themselves and are available for purchase. Now due to legal issues there still must be a person operating the vehicle, but it’s not like that person has to do anything.

Well recently, Tesla was exposed for their self driving car feature being hacked remotely by two guys who were 12 miles away. The hackers were working with Tesla so no real harm was done. The hackers were able to do basically anything they wanted to do with the car from driving it to moving around seats inside of it. The hackers also said that it wasn’t just one model of Tesla, the same hack worked for numerous models they tried it on.

I guess the only bright side to this is that in order for the car to be hacked, the car had to be connected to a malicious WiFi hotspot and the car’s web browser had to be opened manually by the driver. So the moral here is if you ever have a self driving car, a) make sure you’re actually the one driving it. And b) just don’t open your web browser and you’ll be good, for now.

As a side note, Tesla did patch this flaw in their software within 10 days of the flaws being detected, so at least they work faster than apple.